inevitable under the conditions--for which conditions, moreover, they are in part responsible. As to the first charge, it can only be remarked that suppression of what authorities think is subversive and seditious almost invariable has the same effect as would an effort to smother an active volcano. The ideas get expressed anyhow--and more bitterly, with the added circumstance that those who try to do the smothering are burnt. Of course, it is not easy to determine at just what point language becomes directly provocative to violence. This limit of possible official tolerance is far less often reached than would be indicated by the actual conduct of local officials in these circumstances. "It cannot be considered as provocative of immediate disorder," says Police Commissioner Arthur Woods, of New York, "if speakers criticize, no matter how vehemently, the existing order of things, or if they recommend, no matter how enthusiastically, a change which they believe would improve things."[513] When George Creel was police commissioner in Denver he took a similar position and worked on the theory that all ideas could be safely given a hearing. He is reported to have given the following answer to an I. W. W. committee which applied to him for a "soap-box permit": "Go ahead, boys; speak as much as you like; only there's just one favor I'm going to ask. I wish you wouldn't spout directly under the army headquarters. They're not important, but they're childish, and they'll make me lots of bother if you do."[514] The result: nothing more happened than happens when the mine operators say that the leaders of the United Mine Workers ought to be taken out and shot. There was free speech but no fight. After the experience of Spokane, Fresno, and San Diego some members of the organization at least recognized that no matter how absolute their right to pitch into established institutions from every angle, the sober necessities of a successful propaganda for revolutionary industrial unionism demanded more concentration upon that subject. In September, 1913, Ewald Koetgen, a member of the General Executive Board, made this suggestion to the delegates at the eighth convention: If you confine yourself strictly to the propaganda of industrial unionism, and then they prohibit you from using the street corner, you have a much stronger case. Many ... attack everybody, the police, the city officials, religion, politics, and everything else. They speak about everything under the sun and these pretexts are used in order to keep them off the street, whereas, in a good many cities, the organizer could go and speak on industrial unionism, and be left there a whole lot longer....[515]